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Britain to introduce compulsory digital ID for workers

(www.reuters.com)
525 points alex77456 | 4 comments | 26 Sep 25 02:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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remarkEon ◴[26 Sep 25 03:45 UTC] No.45382398[source]▶
>The proposals are the government's latest bid to tackle illegal immigration, with the new ID being a form of proof of a citizen's right to live and work in the UK.

How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem? I watched the video and the suggestion is that this makes it easier for employers to verify that someone is authorized to work. Is that actually true? I don't live in the UK and have not visited in several years. If the idea is that a digital ID authorizes employment ... well I hope people can see the problem, here.

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JumpCrisscross ◴[26 Sep 25 04:49 UTC] No.45382769[source]▶
> How does a digital ID solve an illegal immigration problem?

It's presumably harder to forge a cryptographic signature than paper documents? Not saying it's a good tradeoff. But executed competently, it makes sense in theory.

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1. monerozcash ◴[26 Sep 25 05:42 UTC] No.45383072[source]▶
But it's not very hard to forge the application papers. Passport fraud is already not uncommon in Britain, people are getting authentic passports with cryptographic signatures using dishonest applications every single day.
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2. hdgvhicv ◴[26 Sep 25 06:50 UTC] No.45383510[source]▶
So a forged or stolen id card will be impossible?
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3. incone123 ◴[26 Sep 25 07:07 UTC] No.45383643[source]▶
Can't say until the implementation is revealed, but the person you replied to pointed out that fraud at the application stage is a problem.
4. monerozcash ◴[26 Sep 25 08:10 UTC] No.45384029[source]▶
That depends on the actual implementation of the checking. For example despite passports having chips, essentially no passport control is going to deny you entry if your genuine passport has a broken chip.

So currently at least, a good forged passport will work everywhere except on e-gates. Although on the other hand actually procuring for example a decent forged polycarbonate passport (which most new EU passports are) is next to impossible, the printing techniques used require such expensive machinery that criminals simply don't have access to them.

I've held probably thousands of forged passports, never seen a decent polycarbonate one. Perfect EU id cards you can find everywhere, a lot of them still printed on Teslin.